The Write Life: Speaking for my ... characters ...

One of the more challenging aspects of writing fiction is creating believable dialogue for characters. Writing dialogue the audience may actually be interested in reading is - I believe - one of the areas that can very easily end up being clich?d, stilted or just not real?enough.

Its not just the words the characters are saying?but in how they respond?too. For example, I have seen many stories where the dialogue just reverts to something like:

"Statement from character A," said Character A

"Response of Character B," said Character B

The point of this example is the characters only ever have one response mode. Each character has a line of dialogue and the writer has only described (often referred to as a dialogue tag) this with the word "said" and this ends up being boring and stilted. Having a young son, this is something I have seen in a few of the poorer children's books I have read to him.

On the flip-side of this is too much description of how the characters say something. They can respond, exclaim, question and a number of other ways have their speech described. Using alternatives too much will only make the author look like they were trying too hard and this too?may turn readers away. Also, there seems to be a school of thought along the lines of: the fewer dialogue tags, the better. This is something I agree with but it tricky to implement without the schoolboy error I often revert to of adding a tag after each portion of speech. All this does is make for dialogue that feels like a tennis match when you're sat at the net. Your head switches left and right between the characters - metaphorically speaking that is - and the reader ends up feeling dizzy.

Another pit that is easy to fall into is trying to make in character dialogue just like speech in real life. We all have a point in our speech where we pause in the middle of a sentence. This is either because we are stuck for what to say next or have difficulty in continuing in some way. Usually the brain fills in these gaps as we say "erm" or "um" or similar. Reading a conversation written as we speak can end up being very dull for the reader.

I try very hard when it comes to dialogue not to fall into these traps. Sometimes I succeed but not always. Here is an excerpt from my current story:

"Good morning my friend," Al started all bold and bright.?

I almost laughed at 'my friend', but altogether I was in a reasonable mood so I was happy to let it pass. "Mornin' Al. You're early today."?

"I've a lot to do today and I need to leave early. If they let me." At that I turned to look at him and Al just replied with a smile.?

"Okay," I managed.?

"Listen, Tim, I need your help. Your technical expertise if you will."

A few years ago I took a course in creative writing and the one techniques that the tutor showed with regards to writing was that we needed :

"to write it all out, don't edit until you are finished. Editing whilst writing will only slow you down and you may never finish your story."

I don't follow that advice when it comes to dialogue.?This conversation between my protagonist, Tim, and one of his friends took me a few passes. I even edited some of the dialogue tags when I pasted it to here.

One good trick from my tutor all those years ago that I do remember and try out from time to time is create dialogue for random characters - you may not ever use the dialogue or the characters - but it helps to get to a point where you can create interesting dialogue. My favourite assignment along these lines was to write arguments between characters. I still do this now as a regular?exercise to flex my "dialogue" muscle.

Source: http://theduckwriter.blogspot.com/2012/02/speaking-for-my-characters.html

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